To the woman starting again

You will have noticed that nobody photographs this part.

There are pictures of the before and pictures of the after. The middle — the long, undramatic stretch where you are simply getting through Tuesdays without much evidence of progress — does not photograph well, and so it goes unrecorded, and so it feels like something has gone wrong when you find yourself in it.

Nothing has gone wrong. You are in the part that everyone is in for most of the time.

Whatever brought you here

A relationship that ended, or should have and has not yet. A body that changed, through illness or treatment or medication or age or having had a child or none of those. Work that fell away. A year that took more than it gave. Or nothing you could name, which is somehow harder to explain to people.

It does not especially matter which. The starting again feels similar from inside regardless of the door you came through.

Beginning again is not a failure to have got it right the first time. It is just what a long life is made of.

Small is not a consolation prize

You will read a lot about starting again that assumes a transformation. A plan, a new routine, a version of you arriving in six weeks.

In my experience it is much smaller than that, and the smallness is not a lesser version — it is the actual mechanism.

Getting dressed properly on a day nobody will see you. Answering one message. Going outside for eleven minutes. Buying something that fits the body you have today rather than the one you are negotiating with. Sitting in a chair that is comfortable, with a lamp on, and not doing anything productive in it.

None of that will look like progress. All of it is.

The comparison problem

One thing that will make this harder than it needs to be: you will compare your middle to other people’s afters.

Everything you see of anyone else is edited. Not dishonestly, mostly — people simply do not narrate the long grey part, because there is nothing to say about it and it does not photograph. So the available evidence suggests that everyone else moved from difficulty to resolution in a single step, and you are the only one taking this long.

You are not. You are seeing their highlights against your unedited footage, and no comparison built that way has ever come out in your favour.

What you are allowed to want

A short list, because I think some of this gets forgotten in the middle of a hard stretch.

You are allowed to want your old confidence back and to be irritated that it went. You are allowed to grieve a version of your life that is not coming back, even one other people thought was not that good. You are allowed to want something completely different from what you had. You are allowed to want none of it yet, and to simply get through a fortnight without a plan.

And you are allowed to be angry about the thing that happened, for considerably longer than the people around you would find convenient.

On the time it takes

Longer than you want. Almost certainly longer than the version you have seen described.

And not in a straight line. There will be a good fortnight followed by a bad week, and the bad week will feel like proof that the good fortnight was a fluke. It is not proof of anything. It is a week.

The measure is not whether you had a bad week. It is where you are compared to a year ago, and you will not be able to see that from inside the week.

You do not have to arrive as someone else

This is the part I most want to say.

You are not required to emerge improved. You do not owe anyone a transformation, or a lesson learned, or a version of this that makes a good story. You are allowed to simply come through it as yourself, somewhat tired, carrying what you are carrying.

Starting again does not mean becoming new. Most of the time it just means continuing, on a day when continuing was not obvious.

That is enough. It has always been enough. And you are further along than you can currently see.